Trouble Maker
by herpsy
Summary: Being a problem sometimes makes it difficult to look at yourself objectively and to not get in more trouble. Harry discovers this in a bit more personal terms.
1. Trouble

**Title:** Trouble  
 **Rating:** T for Teens  
 **Warning:** Character death, Depression, lots of uncomfortable parental talk.

 **Summary:**

Being a problem sometimes makes it difficult to look at yourself objectively and to not get in more trouble. Harry discovers this in a bit more personal terms.

* * *

The first time Harry Whitehorse had gotten in trouble, in Dhangrest, was when he was ten years old. Late, he knows, but he hadn't anticipated it working that way. After his parent's deaths, his mother's on the road to Dhangrest and his father's during a monster attack in Zaphias, Harry didn't have a lot of time before then to be a nuisance. So, he made up for it when he did.

Snatching a piece of bread (he'd thrown the gald at the woman's storefront, but his quick escape made him look guilty of something) and he'd gotten mightily scolded for the behavior. His grandfather, however, had been unable to stop the grin he had the entire conversation between them.

The twinkle in his eye, the bemusement of such an inexperienced child pranking someone, fully paying for their items, was just hilarious to the older man.

So Harry took the scolding with a grain of salt and he did it again. And again. And again. The retainers who looked after him called Harry a nightmare, and his grandfather just laughed them all off.

At the end of the day, his grandfather would always, always, hug him and tell him he was a good kid. That reward was enough for the blond. But, as his childish antics grew in size and complexity (all for that smile, all for that grin, to be noticed by the man's large shadow,) the harder it was to turn his eye, and the harder it was to be liked by the people around him.

Pranking people messed with a great many guildie's trusts of the young guild member, dismissing his offers or comments or ideas as just some prank.

It got so bad, Harry at one point couldn't hold himself back. Attacking someone in a bar, hot-headed and angry, he didn't think of the consequences and he was shouting. A fist slammed into his cheek, his nose, ribs, everything ached. And the next time his grandfather looked at him, there was no smile, no playful nudging, just a disappointed stare.

Harry needed to be serious.

But he still got in trouble. For different things, now. For being too serious, for not getting jokes, for being a spoilsport, for not liking the work thrust onto him and needing to loosen up. Harry thought it unfair but didn't comment, only focusing on where he could.

And when his grandfather brought up the idea of him becoming the next Guild Leader in Altosk, Harry balked.

He got in trouble for that, too. Shouting at his grandfather (he'd come home that evening, they'd actually eaten together for once,) and being told he was being a spoiled child. And for sure! Maybe he was. But, the idea of running the guilds meant that something had to happen to his grandfather, and that was not an idea Harry wanted to entertain.

Donnic "Don" Whitehorse was invincible, what could possibly happen to him to dethrone him from his rightful place helping and leading Dhangrest and the Union.

Harry.

Harry motherfucking Whitehorse could happen.

He hadn't ever done anything this reckless before, and Harry had done some very reckless things. He'd gotten intel, something big, very big, and he had to make a snap decision. If he did nothing, he was risking the lives of maybe a hundred or so people at the Coliseum.

He made his choice and took his bets.

And now here he was. Sitting inside of an empty house that would never be filled again.

Harry Whitehorse messed up a great deal, but this wasn't something he was used to. Women called him too serious and aloof, other guild members would comment how he was too unreliable and unrealistic, his family would argue he's a good kid.

Emphasis on kid.

Walking out of the house, Harry wanted to be anywhere but there. And so that happened. Harry opting out of staying at his home for Sagittarius or the Guild Hall. He ignored mistakes he made, pushed forward with treaties, and made sure that he could get his footing in the door. He had to. He had to…

Raven was back in town.

They didn't discuss what happened.

He showed up and Harry was just expected to act like it was normal. So he did. Until he got a few drinks in him and winded up punching a guy in the teeth for sneering at him for not punishing his Guild for leaving him. He didn't need the reminder. Unfortunately, Harry was caught after a few swings, and both Harry and the guy were dragged away from one another before either could get fully hurt.

The guy'd gotten a couple good shots, but Harry knew he left a good wallop of his own.

Sitting inside the infirmary, chewing idly on a gel, a sigh could be heard as a voice with a thick accent commented lightly towards someone on the other side. Harry didn't need to see who it was.

They stopped talking, and one pair of footsteps walked away, leaving the second outside his door, just beyond his sight.

"So, what's my damage, old man, or did ya run off again?"

Silence.

"Aw, c'mon. No, what were you thinking, or, you should know better by now."

There was a shifting of cloth. Raven's cloak. Harry could tell by the way the material moved. His grandfather had given Raven the schematics for that thing, even if he'd made some personal edits to it. Making it thicker, working more as a cover for armor. But it was unique to Raven, and the soft ticking of the knife at his belt as he shuffled with the layers of fabric said everything.

Even if Harry couldn't see him do any of it.

He just imagined Raven's face. Disgruntled, frustrated. Assuming the worst (everyone did, everyone always made assumptions now,) and thinking of what was best to punish this ignorant-

"Is that what this's all about?"

Harry kicked his feet, leaning elbows on his knees as he stared at the floor.

"You attacked someone because you were angry at me."

He sounded frustrated. As if it was such a juvenile thing to be upset about. And maybe it was, but Harry didn't care about that. Being juvenile, he was seventeen (eighteen, eighteen now.) He wasn't supposed to make all of these decisions, be in charge of all of these peoples.

His grandfather was.

Harry's fingers balled up tightly into fists, nails digging into the palm of his hand. Raven still hadn't even come into sight. Just standing there. All mightier than Harry, as if he was so much better, so much greater than Harry.

"I-"

"You're in charge of a lotta people now, Harry. You don't have time for these type of outbursts."

Harry bit the inside of his cheek sharply. It tasted like blood. Not surprising, he'd bitten the cheek that had a pretty bad bruise.

"Goddess, you're the fifth cog in the Union, how do you think that shows the rest of the world how we react when we can't even keep our Guild Leader from punching some random shmuck."

"He insulted me."

"Great, so a Guild Leader who can't take criticism-"

"He said I should have kicked you out a long time ago and found a replacement."

Silence.

There was a deep breath pulled into Raven's lungs, audible before he heard footsteps. Slowly, Harry glanced up from around long blond bangs. Looking up towards Raven.

"I was angry 'cuz he's right."

Raven was looking at him curiously now. Brows furrowed, mouth pressed together, arms crossed. He was waiting for an explanation. For why the guy was right, why should he be kicked out, if Harry was going to kick him out? Harry was, after all, still (now) the Guild Leader. He was, for all intents and purposes, The Don.

Licking chapped lips, Harry's gaze lowered again. "I thought you were dead for a while. Ya didn't 'zactly try ta come back. Or send a letter. Or make it known you were on a mission. And no report I had claimed differently." He could feel Raven's eyes, staring through his bandages, as if assessing if Harry had any right to tell him any of this.

A stupid brat who'd just gotten into a fist fight, telling him …

"Then when you did come back, no report, no words, you just were and everythin' went back to normal." Or as normal as it could be, now. "I didn' know what ta do. I thought ta ask, but you don't 'zactly seem ta stick. Hurryin' off after mission reports you need to be there on."

Whatever connection they had before. The small stupid things Harry liked to do, the randomly meeting at the house for dinner, staying close, keeping an eye on him. It was gone. All of it.

Why did he expect anything different?

Was it because of what happened to his grandfather?

Was it because Harry was so incompetent that Raven couldn't bear to watch?

Harry shuffled back, his ribs hurt, but he curled one leg up close, wrapping his arms around it and leaning his chin against it.

"So, what are ya gonna do about it?"

Harry didn't speak. He didn't have an answer. He didn't want to fire Raven, he was too instrumental, and he did his job well. He knew what he was doing because of experience and time and … well, Harry would, unfortunately, admit his emotional connection with Raven skewed his perspective. Harry didn't want Raven gone.

"Dunno." It sounded defeated, even to Harry's own ears. "Sorry to have bothered you, I guess." Sorry, only because he was supposed to say it. Raven would know that. "You don't have to be here now. I can take care of myself."

He could. Harry's been made to do so for a good chunk of time now.

"Stupid brat…" The words, despite Harry knowing that's what he thought, stung. Shuffling, Raven patted Harry's leg to move the boy over, settle down next to him. "...I figured we'd have ta do this sometime. So much trouble on these ol' bones."

But he was hoping he could avoid it.

The thought was unavoidable as Harry shifted over to allow for his mentor (that is what Raven was, in simplest terms,) and let him get comfortable for them to talk.


	2. Maker

**Title:** Trouble  
 **Rating:** T for Teens  
 **Warning:** Character death, Depression, lots of uncomfortable parental talk.

 **Summary:**

Being a problem sometimes makes it difficult to look at yourself objectively and to not get in more trouble. Harry discovers this in a bit more personal terms.

* * *

Raven had been through a lot.

Anyone with two eyes and a nose between 'em could sniff out that information, even if the eyes didn't work. And Raven always dismissed it with a laugh or roll of the eyes. Sometimes a dirty joke. For the most part, he'd just keep it to himself.

He'd learned that little trick from Harry Whitehorse. The ball of energy was annoyingly optimistic at times, or he used to be. The bright fluffy ball of blond hair and bright blue eyes twirling around as he laughed and grinned, prodding to get a laugh out of the old man. (He'd claim Raven's lips were too pursed, that he looked like he was perpetually pouting.) Laughter was always the best trick.

And Harry knew it, too. Raven at first hadn't noticed it, because the brat was always grinning, and when he wasn't doing that, he was acting out.

He did, however, notice the shift one day after a brawl. Don was running thick calloused fingers through his hair. The statement: "I don't know what I'm going to do with that kid" coming up over and over again. Raven had thought it a silly thing to get worked up over, but when they went to check out Harry and saw the condition he was in, (bloody nose, busted lip, bruised face, knuckles, and bandages around his midsection,) Don could only stare in dissatisfaction. Disappointment.

And the boy's smile, a weak thing, twisted up at the corners of his mouth, wilted.

That was when he realized it. Harry's smile had slowly started becoming less sincere. Copying what he saw his peers do, and the reminder he was who Harry had the most common access too struck hard, making his old chest ache.

Rubbing at his blastia now and again, Raven watched the bright energy shift into nervousness. Something he knew would happen, but he never stepped out of his way to make it better. Wasn't his place, as a stand-in, to do anything. Though despite that, he found himself in strange places.

Standing at the kid's door and noticing he'd made too much food and nobody at the table. Finding him in front of the Guild Hall practicing. Sitting alone in Sagittarius, staring off into some weird corner. And Raven couldn't help himself.

Knocking on that door. Helping the kid with a few pointers. Sitting down with the kid and nudging the child, making him snort his drink a couple of times or huffing or just causing some other emotion. It worked usually and he got the satisfaction of seeing the kid relax, shoulders un-tense, a smile slowly spread, and a few jokes kicked back with a drink if he was lucky.

There was no joking at work. That meant in both senses of the term, too. The letters he received, calling him away, the jobs he took as Raven. All of it was very carefully calculated, both aware and unaware of the growing fondness for the family that kept him. Trying to keep them all at arm's length while unwittingly coming face to face with them.

Schwann would see little things, things in the way the Tweedles acted, (he had to call them that, it was too funny to not,) and relating it to similar experiences with the young Whitehorse. Bleeding over the two personalities in ways he didn't anticipate, didn't want, and he had to wrench himself away from becoming too caught up in it.

Distance himself.

Again and again, did he distance himself.

As Schwann, as Raven, as this weird mix between the two of them. The moments as he stared in a mirror, hair down, coat slung across his shoulders lazily. No hair tie to be seen.

Where did one personality begin and the other end, both farces he couldn't quite face.

And when the mistake happened, Raven cracked. Every piece in himself breaking piece by slow piece. A pillar that Raven stood on no longer able to hold upright, and the only thing left of it a sniveling child curled onto the ground, unable to look at his grandfather as he took the ultimate sacrifice.

It still did not make the life he lived any easier, so he reveled in it when he acquired a new assignment. Clung to it as he flipped through information through the personality that would allow him to pull away. Put up that happy mask. He hadn't even considered the Whitehorse's, hadn't even thought twice about leaving.

There was nothing left here.

Only the shadow of what once were good memories in a dead man's heart.

Once he had been saved, there was little else for him. He searched for his pillar (again, again, he needed somebody there, somebody to point him in the right direction,) and when he'd found it, the thought of the small child was far, far from his mind. He saved the world with them all, he'd finally built himself up enough, been through enough, he could finally stand alone.

So he'd gone back.

Everything was different. The atmosphere of the town, the way people looked at him, the feeling of being in Dhangrest. What else could he expect after his death. Even when he heard Harry's words, knew the child would work to try and do the things his grandfather could never do, Raven could scarce believe it. Which made when he walked into his first meeting with the child eye-opening.

Gone was, what he thought, a sniffling child. Harry held nothing back against his Union members. Snapping at them, bringing up logistics, ideals, philosophies, treaties, everything done within the last ten years. He was reckless, sometimes, shooting off at the mouth and Raven had to catch the fall, but it was night and day to what Raven had thought would happen.

Which made it when Harry got into a fight all the more damming. It was a bar brawl, something Raven learned wasn't as common for Harry as it used to be, but still did happen from time to time as he stood outside the infirmary.

Disappointment rang in Raven's chest as he stood outside the door. He couldn't face the child, even as he was mocked, pushed, attempted to get some sort of response out of him. Only when he was certain of why Harry did what he did, did Raven speak.

"...you attacked someone because you were angry at me."

There was no answer. The pause indicting guilt over the action. Raven went for the throat, snapping. Because it was his job now. Harry could not risk the entirety of Dhangrest over petty frustrations. But it was when the blond brought up something else, did Raven startle and he finally enters the room. Looking at Harry. Really looking at him now. Not for the first time, and he doubted the last. The boy with bandages wrapped about his chest and a bruise welling up on his cheek.

"...I didn' know what ta do. I thought ta ask, but you don't 'zactly seem ta stick. Hurryin' off after mission reports you need to be there on."

He hadn't visited Harry's house recently, had he?

Or sparred with him.

Raven hadn't done a lot of things, recently, and the way Harry curled in on himself confirmed he should have been. Things that he didn't think of meaning so much to someone else.

"So, what are ya gonna do about it?"

"...dunno." He sounded broken. "Sorry to have bothered you, I guess. You don't have to be here now. I can take care of myself."

Raven couldn't contain the sigh that spilled out as he shuffled in closer towards the teenager, gently patting his leg to scoot the boy out of way, and besides Harry, he sat. "...I figured we'd have ta do this sometime." Almost as an afterthought, Raven tacks on, "So much trouble on these ol' bones."

The silence between the two of them stands. Raven's own thoughts spinning quickly to try and come up with anything, anything for him. Justifying his disappearance. Excusing his behavior. Leaving the child alone in a street after his grandfather's … beheading. It would be so easy to blame the man who he was following orders for, it wasn't that easy to do.

It wasn't Alexei who had made him give up, after all.

Only after a handful of minutes, does Raven begin to speak. "The moment yer ol' man died, it kin'a left me, all'a us really, lost." Looking over the boy, Raven couldn't help but notice how Harry wasn't looking up at him. Nodding to himself, Raven returned to looking forward at the wall. "He was such an important figure, it left us in disarray, and personally? I couldn't stay here."

There was so much hope in Don Whitehorse. The man was such a big person, changing everything, everyone with just his presence. To lose him was like losing water or air. Things so vitally important that you couldn't exist without them.

"So I left ta figure myself out. It wasn't an intentional thing, I never thought about hurtin' you," he never even thought about this child afterward. Or, not except for the spare few people who had come to him. Asking him to take charge, that Harry wasn't worth it. And he'd told them to get the boy off his ass.

That had been the passing thought Harry had earned. "I disobeyed the laws, puttin' myself before Dhangrest, before Altosk, an' I left it to flounder till you took stride."

"Is that it?" Raven restrained a wince by a cocking a brow towards the blond's question. "No words, no nothing. Just because, what? You forgot?" There's hurt in his tone and Raven can't entirely blame him, but he didn't appreciate the way Harry spoke, almost disregarding what he'd said earlier.

"Yeah. That's it." Taking in a slow breath, Raven steadied himself. He had to be the adult here. "I know it's not a good reason," It's just an excuse. "I was in a bad place, Harry. That ain't right or fair to you, but it's what happens. What happened." He couldn't change it now. And, honestly? "I won't apologize for fer doing it…" He needed to. "I will say I am sorry I didn't think about your feelings." It wasn't fair.

And to have added onto the pressure Harry was under was never Raven's intention. If, perhaps, he felt justified in doing. "But you've got to understand too what you have ta do now."

He watched as the child's fingers curled up tightly in his lap. Head ducking to stare, glare at his hands. "...yeah."

"I'll try and...talk with ya more. Okay?"

Harry nodded.

Raven slowly wrapped an arm about Harry, pulling him in close to his chest. "I'm sorry…"

Harry had stiffened sharply at the touch. But had slowly relaxed as he shifted to sit in closer. His eyes closing, sighing. "Yer hurtin' my ribs, old man."

"Oh well."

" _Asshole_."

Raven laughed. He could feel the pricking of a smile against his shirt. "Love you too, squirt."

* * *

Hi so I uh. Low-key love exploring this dynamic.

Sorry about that.

Anyway! Hope you enjoyed this. It was a ton of fun to play around with.


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